Functions of genre in Bay Muannit Sahtegi’nin notları: The diary genre as a means of masculine domination and masculinist discourse

Abstract

This thesis, centred upon the examination of the phallogocentric discourse in Vüs’at O. Bener’s novel, Bay Muannit Sahtegi’nin Notları (1991), shows how the dominant masculinist voice legitimizes itself through the generic functions of the diary genre. In this novel, the reproduced heteronormative reality of the first-person narrative brings about a categorical oppression of all female characters and makes masculine domination the only authority on female characters by intra-textual reality. All the dominating voices in the text (the protagonist, the narrator and the fictional rewriter of the diary) belong to the same person, Mr. Muannit Sahtegi. In this way, the narrator’s focalization restricts his addressees, categorically silencing all women, and declares his being as the only reproducer of reality. However, how and why does a masculine narrator make himself credible? According to Thomas O. Beebee, all genres provide a “use-value,” and all generic choices contain ideological functions. In this regard, this thesis shows how using the diary genre provides generic functions to legitimize the autodiagetic narrator’s masculinist voice in this novel. What does the form of diary, as a means of fiction, guarantee to the addressees, by using and transgressing Philippe Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact”? This thesis asserts that the novel of Bay Muannit Sahtegi’nin Notları uses the diary genre as a means of credibility for protagonist-narrator and fictional writer Mr. Sahtegi’s monopolized voice in order that it can make the addressee convinced to the masculinist discourse in this text. (See the Appendix for an extended abstract.)